A Polish programmer running on fumes recently accomplished what may soon become impossible: beating an advanced AI model from OpenAI in a head-to-head coding competition. The 10-hour marathon left him "completely exhausted."
On Wednesday, programmer Przemysław Dębiak (known as "Psyho"), a former OpenAI employee, narrowly defeated the custom AI model in the AtCoder World Tour Finals 2025 Heuristic contest in Tokyo. AtCoder, a Japanese platform that hosts competitive programming contests and maintains global rankings, held what may be the first contest where an AI model competed directly against top human programmers in a major onsite world championship. During the event, the maker of ChatGPT participated as a sponsor and entered an AI model in a special exhibition match titled "Humans vs AI." Despite the tireless nature of silicon, the company walked away with second place.
"Humanity has prevailed (for now!)," wrote Dębiak on X, noting he had little sleep while competing in several competitions across three days. "I'm completely exhausted. ... I'm barely alive."
